oh and here's the original game, which I also bought a decade later.
Kosterix
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Rome: Fate of an Empire, in its printed form suffers from
(-) the barrier to entry is quite high. I mean, we all know it's kind of Mage Knight complexity.
(-) Game takes forever;
(-) Game has no scoring sheet;
(-) Being told to pick a leader of your choice and two edicts of your choice is kind of a fake choice that actually produces choice stress: there should be guidance from the designer on where to start.
(-) the starting bonus of 3 gold (normal) and 7 (casual) feels arbitrary and (sorry) fake.
The campaign mode provided here addresses all these issues, and I believe this is for the better.
As follows:
(+) just have a die decide on a leader, start with partial edict 1 and if you win you mark that; if next time you roll the same leader, you have him complete partial edict 2 and so on. When you roll another leader, he starts with edict 1 the same way. No more self doubting!
(+) The bonus in gold should be dynamic, it starts off with 10 but gets smaller and smaller as you play higher numbered edicts,
(+) Because it felt not stimulating to penalize players by forcing them to retry, failing should simply be noted, assuming you learned a thing or two by the experience. But to avoid making result pointless, I added that you gain as starting bonus a resource of your choice, based on the number of wins, of that leader.Which should help you at later edicts.
(+) As for scoring sheets:
At bare minimum, 6 leaders x 10 different partial edicts requires at least 60 rows in a campaign marker; but I added 100 for scoring your regular game mode as well. Oh and Very easy mode as well as Easy mode, you play max 3 rounds, max 3 turns, and unlock Advanced Developments earlier. That's why I provided the round tracker to reflect this.
so, download and print both the tracker page and the campaign sheet with more details than I can add here.
Enjoy!
lol we live and learn.
it's actually common practice in IT to throw away prototypes. The idea being that you are not tempted to stick with the old, obsolete design, and green field is more attractive.
Intermezzos after 25 50 100 250 500 1000 drop a little intermezzo piece of lore, give the sine wave a name and a purpose (find a soul mate perhaps)
It took a few tries to figure out that holding the mouse button stops the wave and your score is not the blocks you avoid but the sine waves you complete.
I dunno, I'm not into memoryless skirmish mobile games at all, but
I associate sine waves with color frequencies, so maybe give the past wave a color.
Varying the width (bandwidth) could also give some variation.
Every 10 blocks avoided gives you a bomb. Otherwise it's for a target audience that always wants the same.
Product was full of typos and mistakes, they couldn't even get the date right. I'm not talking about skipping weekends but even the most basic things they got wrong. New editions - they never learn from past mistakes.
Then the usability, the resolution of day x should be on the next page, not the current. Constantly need to flip back and forth. The holder should provide for storing the dice. It's such a shoddy, superficial product I won't ever back them ever again. It's great to make mistakes but if you don't want to learn I have no business with you.